Handbook of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood

Virginia Buysse, Ellen Peisner-Feinberg

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781598574241
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Response to intervention (RTI) is improving student outcomes in K–12 classrooms across the country, but how can it best be applied in early childhood settings? Find out in this authoritative handbook, the first complete resource on what we know about using RTI to promote all young children's school and social success.

With cutting-edge research from more than 60 of today's leading experts, this foundational resource will be an essential reference for every early childhood administrator, whether program-, district-, or state-level. You'll get a comprehensive primer on RTI, including detailed information on its defining principles and features, its evidence base, specific RTI models, and program-level supports for implementing RTI. Then you'll get research-based knowledge and guidance to help you

• implement specific tiered approaches to instruction and intervention, including Recognition & Response and the Teaching Pyramid
• use valid, reliable universal screening and progress monitoring measures
• use RTI to enrich literacy and math curriculum and instruction
• strengthen school-wide positive behavior supports with an RTI framework
• integrate RTI and inclusion to strengthen education for students with disabilities
• adapt RTI to meet the needs of young dual language learners
• develop effective professional development to support RTI in early childhood
• engage families as active partners in the RTI process
• successfully sustain your RTI efforts throughout your next school year and beyond

Equally valuable as a key reference for administrators and a textbook for university courses, this cornerstone volume will help RTI flourish in early childhood settings—so every young child has the best chance for school success.

V

Program-Level Supports for Implementing Response to Intervention in Early Childhood

19

Using Consultation to Support the Implementation of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood Settings

Steven E. Knotek, Carly Hoffend, and Kristina S. Ten Haagen

The general emphasis in response to intervention (RTI) models is on using screening measures, multilevel problem solving, and early intervention and prevention practices to support children’s educational success rather than waiting to provide corrective measures after children begin to fail (Barnett, VanDerHeyden, & Witt, 2007). This approach requires substantial changes in how teachers and early interventionists individually and collectively conduct their professional duties (Hoagwood & Johnson, 2002). For example, how will teachers choose between a standard treatment protocol and a problem-solving approach? How will early childhood educators adopt “evidence-based interventions” that may work well under ideal conditions in a university-based preschool but must be implemented within the ecological complexity of their underfunded individual setting? Program implementation and accompanying professional development does not happen in a vacuum. What processes can be used to support early childhood practitioners’ development of skills needed to implement RTI, such as screening and progress monitoring?

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the elements and aims of RTI and then considers challenges that get in the way of its implementation. Next, consultation is defined and a rationale presented for using consultation to facilitate the development of skills that will be needed by consultees to implement and sustain the RTI model in individual sites. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of how consultation can facilitate consultees’ acquisition of RTI-related skills and why specific aspects of early childhood settings should be considered when implementing consultation.

In order for RTI to successfully be embedded in early education settings and become a fixture in a preschool’s prevention and problem-solving procedures, consultants need to create a development plan to implement and sustain RTI (Kratochwill, Volpiansky, Clements, & Ball, 2007). At a minimum, RTI requires that staff adopt a prevention and early intervention conceptual framework while applying a host of potentially new skills and procedures.

Guskey (2002) highlighted three major issues that must be attended to as professionals acquire new skills. First, it is important to understand that change is a gradual process that can be challenging. Preschool and child care staff have acquired preferred methods and extensive funds of knowledge (Hiatt-Michael, 2007) that they access to achieve their professional aims. In some ways, innovation implementation is audacious in that it asks staff to move out of their comfort zone and/or to confront the idea that some aspect of their professional practice could and should be improved, while trusting that the newest thing will not have a negative impact on their students or themselves. Being asked to invest precious time to acquire and implement a new skill that may or may not help students may seem overwhelming and even foolish. A program’s structure and process must include a mechanism (i.e., consultation) to support staff so that they can successfully address the challenges presented throughout the change process and consider how the intervention (i.e., RTI) offers a positive alternative to current practice. Second, teachers will need consistent feedback on how RTI is supporting their children in the desired dimensions of prevention and early intervention. Third, professionals must be provided with a supportive experience that will foster their acquisition of the scientific tools (Vygotsky, 1986) offered by RTI that will further enhance their practice. In combination, these three principles all highlight the need for a teacher (i.e., preschool teacher as consultee) to receive competent, respectful, thoughtful, data-driven support from an engaged supporter (i.e., itinerant specialist as consultant).

Breadth and Depth of response to intervention models

RTI models are striking in their large-scale reach across the whole population of children in a preschool and in their multidimensional array of interventions. The philosophy of RTI incorporates a prevention perspective and reframes students’ performance from a deficit approach to one of potential; this theoretical change in turn redefines how preschool teachers, staff, and itinerant specialists should carry out their professional practice. RTI will require that sites use an intervention hierarchy; utilize screening, assessment, and progress monitoring; successfully implement a research-based curriculum; and embed a collaborative problem-solving approach throughout the process (Buysse & Peisner-Feinberg, 2010). These training challenges are daunting, and the complex RTI process will not be successfully embedded through a series of disconnected workshops. As Guskey (2002) suggests, a sustained interactive process will be needed to help staff acquire and master the RTI process. This need is especially relevant in early childhood settings that tend to serve high-risk children and also experience exceedingly high teacher turnover (Ball & Trammell, 2011). Consultation is an interpersonal problem-solving process that can be used to manage and sustain the implementation of RTI in a preschool.

RESPONSE TO INTERVENTION FOCUSED CONSULTATION

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) have outlined components of technical assistance that should be part of ongoing professional development (NAEYC & NACCRR, 2011). NAEYC and NACCRRA (2011, p. 9) defined technical assistance as the “provision of targeted and customized supports by a professional(s) with subject matter and adult learning knowledge and skills to strengthen processes, knowledge application, or implementation of services by recipients.” Five types of technical assistance are presented, and two—coaching and consultation—have particular salience for supporting early childhood practitioners’ implementation of RTI.

Consultation

Consultation may be generally defined as an indirect service through which a consultee (e.g., a preschool teacher) gains support for a client (e.g., a student) by engaging in a problem-solving process with a consultant (itinerant consultant) (Bergan & Kratochwill, 1990; Caplan, 1970). The goal of consultation is to use systematic problem solving to enhance the consultee’s ability to solve a pressing work-related problem while simultaneously improving his or her capacity to successfully meet similar challenges in the future. In this sense, consultation has a here-and-now focus in the service of a future-oriented prevention approach.

The consultation process centers on the joint development of new approaches to improve service delivery. Consultation may focus on resolving a specific issue with a specific client or it may involve addressing challenges to providing services to many students in a classroom or an even higher level of organization such as an entire school or school district. For instance, in a preschool setting a teacher may initiate consultation with an itinerant consultant in order to problem-solve about ways to provide classroom support for a child with developmental delays who is experiencing peer rejection. In this case the teacher has primary responsibility for the child and the itinerant consultant has primary responsibility to facilitate the teacher’s acquisition of new perspectives and possible solutions to the work problem (i.e., interventions to support the other children’s welcoming of the student into class).

Coaching

Coaching is a process in which a coach uses knowledge about adult learning to support professional development (Sugai & Horner, 2006). The coach is considered to be an expert who helps a “learner” to acquire new skills or dispositions to address child-related problems. The relationship between coach and peer is the focus of the coaching process and includes elements such as rapport building and reflection (Cheliotes & Reilly, 2010). In early childhood education, coaching has been used traditionally in home-based settings and more recently as a component of professional development in quality improvement and other initiatives. Like consultation (Knotek, 2011), coaching has been cited as an important means to facilitate the implementation and continued fidelity of interventions newly applied in educational settings (George, Kincaid, & Pollard-Sage, 2009).

In their traditional definitions, consultation and coaching are described as differing in their foci (capacity building/prevention versus specific skill development), relationships (collaborator versus learner), process (joint problem solving versus reflection), and impact level (individual to system versus individual to individual) (Killion & Harrison, 2006; Gutkin & Curtis, 2008; NAEYC & NACCRR, 2011). However, the distinctions between consultation and coaching are blurring as each practice evolves to utilize best practice and to address current needs in the field. Both models focus on using effective communication skills, a collaborative relationship, and focused problem solving to enhance teachers’ service delivery. For example, the movement toward implementing evidence-based interventions has highlighted the need to provide a mechanism to support implementation and the ongoing fidelity of innovations. Practitioners who call themselves consultants or coaches must utilize focused problem solving along with focused professional development to meet the needs of current practice.

Consultation, coaching, and RTI share the core aims of prevention and early intervention along with a focus on enhancing service delivery through professional development at the individual and system levels. This chapter refers to the use of RTI-focused consultation in its discussion of consultation, coaching, and change. However, the RTI-focused consultation described here can be considered to be a blend of consultation and coaching approaches. It is defined as an indirect service in which the consultant/coach enhances the capacity of the consultee/peer to support his or her clients/students. The process emphasizes nonhierarchical collaboration, effective communication, joint problem solving, and professional development in the service of prevention, early intervention, and competency building in children.

RTI-focused consultation is well suited to support the implementation of RTI because 1) it is also prevention focused, 2) it is designed to foster consultees’ adaptation to novel work problems such as deciding how to implement new Tier 2 group interventions, 3) it is content neutral and can be used to discuss implementation issues ranging from individual cases to systemwide sustainability, and 4) it incorporates knowledge about adult learning to foster the embedded professional development that will be needed to help teachers and other care providers implement the array of new skills and dispositions that will be needed for RTI to be successful (Knotek, 2007).

CONSULTATION TO PROMOTE SKILL ACQUISITION

The skills and procedures that are needed to operate RTI with fidelity will have to be learned on the job by many of the staff. Peske and Haycock (2006) noted that teachers in high-risk preschool settings tend to have lower levels of education and competency. Few teachers or teachers’ aides will be fully trained in, for example, progress monitoring or data-based decision making. Consultation can be used to support the staff’s sustained acquisition of skills and their subsequent application to the R&R process; however, the consultant will have to consider a consultee’s level of skill development when engaging in problem solving around implementation of RTI. An understanding of Showers and Joyce’s (1996) levels of professional development will help consultants target and refine their consultation.

As preschools attempt to provide ongoing professional training, it has become clear that this training should be targeted to a consultee’s current level of skill development (Baldwin & Ford, 1988; Showers & Joyce, 1996). The model presented by Showers and Joyce (1996) suggests that staff will progress through four developmental levels as they learn to implement new skills. A consultant can target his or her consultation to fit the developmental demands the staff/consultees may be experiencing as they progress through these four levels: awareness, conceptual understanding, skill acquisition, and application of skills.

Level One: An awareness of the problem is heightened through didactic presentations that result in a person’s ability to cite the general ideas and principles associated with the intervention. In RTI, staff would be able to cite the essential components of the model.

Level Two: An individual’s deepening conceptual understanding of an intervention is facilitated through modeling and demonstration. For example, within RTI an individual who had acquired conceptual understanding of the importance of prevention and early intervention would be able to conceptually articulate the difference between RTI and the preschool’s previous stance.

Level Three: Skill acquisition occurs when a person engages in simulated practices that are observed and commented on by a facilitator. A staff member would learn how to use a new screener and then problem-solve which students might benefit from Tier 2 group interventions.

Level Four: This level of professional development is reached when a person is able to demonstrate a successful application of the new intervention within the actual context of his or her school site. A teacher who is able to implement RTI would be able to adjust her teaching role to support identified students in small-group activities.

It is likely that the implementation of RTI will have varying levels of success across sites. In an era of tight funding, professional development may be limited to the more traditional didactic approaches and the essential longer-term supports may be restricted. Consultation is not a substitute for a deep and extensive professional development program; however, it can be targeted to support staff/consultees’ acquisition of the concepts, skills, and procedures that will be required to implement RTI with a high degree of fidelity.

Awareness

RTI has attained a high level of visibility in elementary and secondary schools as districts and states have moved to require it as the core prevention and early intervention problem-solving process. Stakeholders in school districts, from parents to teachers, are being made aware of the changes to school policies and procedures that will accompany RTI’s implementation. However, in early childhood education settings RTI is currently emerging as a potential prevention and early intervention process. Administrators may face a tough sell as they ask busy staff to disrupt their current practice to implement an emerging innovation that will require them to acquire new skills and apply new procedures, no matter how beneficial the innovation may be to students.

Given the fact that early childhood RTI models are just being developed, staff and parents may not know about the specifics or even the generalities of RTI. Lack of knowledge has been cited as an ongoing challenge to implementing RTI in preschools (Carta & Greenwood, 2009). Confusion may surround even the rationale for it as stakeholders may not be aware of the theoretical prevention/early intervention underpinnings of RTI. Administrators will need to make staff and families aware of not only what RTI is, but why it is necessary.

A consultant can help the administrator think through the message and means to use to present the case for RTI to the preschool community. The consultant can help the administrator/consultee anticipate initial objections and challenges to RTI that may be put forward. A goal will be to have the consultee think through the most propitious means to present the idea of RTI to the staff and the preschool community and then to have advantages of RTI’s implementation ready to share.

At a more basic level, the consultation may need to focus on how to address gaps in some staff members’ prior knowledge about key domains in development and in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword
• I: Introduction
• II: Foundations of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood
• III: Assessment within Response to Intervention
• IV: Curriculum and Instruction within Response to Intervention
• V: Program-Level Supports for Implementing Response to Intervention in Early Childhood
• VI: Future Challenges and New Directions
• Index